Brown meat on all sides to seal in juices.
Carmalize onions, add garlic just as the onions turn light golden, cook till golden.
Add meat, onions, garlic, tomatoes, 1/5 of the spices to a pressure cooker (size amount to match size of cooker it takes me four cooker loads for this recipe). Pressure cook for at least 45 mins.
Transfer to a crock pot, cook on low for 24 hours stiring every hour or so and removing any floating fat, add remaining spices 1/2 hour before serving.

Chile peppers don't have to be healthy to be fun to eat, but fortunately, they are. In fact, they have quite a long history as a folk remedy for all kinds of ailments, from anorexia to vertigo. Some of the more scientifically recognized medical applications of chile peppers include treatments for asthma, arthritis, blood clots, cluster headaches, post-herpetic neuralgia (shingles), and severe burns.Chile peppers contain only a few calories (thirty-seven per 100 grams of green chile, about three and a half ounces), and possibly have the ability to burn off those calories and others as well. This intriguing possibility comes from researchers at Oxford Polytechnic Institute in England, who conducted an experiment in TEF, an acronym meaning "thermic effects of food." Twelve volunteers ate identical 766-calorie meals. On one day, three grams each of chile powder and mustard were added to the meals; on the next day, nothing was added. On the days chile and mustard were added, the volunteers burned between four to seventy-six additional calories, with an average of forty-five. The researchers concluded that the test was "a possible lead to a different approach to weight reduction," but also warned that the effect had been demonstrated in only one small test. They also cautioned that six grams (1/5 ounce) of the chile-mustard mixture "may be a large amount for the average American. If you are used to Mexican, Spanish, or Indian food, though, it's reasonable." Apossible explanation for the process is the fact that certain hot spices--especially chiles--temporarily speed up the body's metabolism. After eating, the metabolic rate increases anyway--a phenomenon known as "diet-induced thermic effect." But chiles boost that effect by a factor of twenty-five, which seems to indicate that increasing the amount of chile in a recipe could reduce the effective caloric content--provided, of course, that one does not drink more beer to counter the added heat.Another intriguing possibility has been suggested by T. George Harris, who wrote in American Health magazine that chiles stimulate the taste buds but not the sense of smell. Thus they "perk up food without adding fat." Harris added that he formerly made jokes about hot pepper diets, but now, "over the last couple of years, chile peppers have begun to emerge as the nutritional heroes of the future."Most of the research on the nutritional properties of hot peppers has concerned the New Mexican pod types because they are consumed more as a food than a condiment. The long green pods are harvested, roasted and peeled, and are stuffed or made into sauces. Some of the green pods are allowed to turn red on the bush; after harvesting, these red chiles are used as the primary ingredient in red chile sauces. The green chiles are quite high in vitamin C, with about twice the amount by weight found in citrus, while dried red chiles contain more vitamin A than carrots. Vitamin C is one of the least stable of all the vitamins; it will break down chemically by heat, exposure to air, solubility in water, and by dehydration. Vitamin A, however, is one of the most stable vitamins and is not affected by canning, cooking, or time. Ahigh percentage of vitamin C in fresh green chiles is retained in the canned and frozen products, but the vitamin C content drops dramatically in the dried red pods and powder. Each hundred grams of fresh ripe chile pods contains 369 milligrams of vitamin C, which diminishes by more than half to 154 milligrams in the dried red pods. Red chile powder contains less than three percent of the vitamin C of ripe pods, a low ten milligrams.The amount of vitamin A dramatically increases as the pod turns red and dries, from 770 units per hundred grams of green pods to 77,000 in freshly processed dried red pods. This hundred fold rise in vitamin A content is the result of increasing carotene, the chemical which produces the orange and red colors of ripe peppers. The recommended daily allowances for these vitamins are 5000 International Units for A and sixty milligrams for C. These allowances can be satisfied daily by eating about a teaspoon full of red chile sauce for A and about one ounce of fresh green chile for C.Each hundred grams of green chile contains less than two tenths of a gram of fat, a very low amount. Since no cholesterol is found in vegetable products, peppers are free of it. The fiber content of fresh hot peppers is fairly high (between 1.3 and 2.3 grams per hundred grams of chile), and many of the dishes prepared with them utilize starchy ingredients such as beans, pasta, and tortillas. And the sugar in chiles is in the form of healthy complex carbohydrates.Fresh green chile contains only 3.5 to 5.7 milligrams of sodium per hundred grams--a very low amount. We suggest that chile peppers can be very useful for the low sodium dieter. The substitution of hot peppers for salt makes gustatory sense because the pungency of the peppers counteracts the blandness of the meal resulting from salt restrictions. In other words, the heat masks the absence of salt.However, canned green chile peppers should be avoided because of the salt used in the canning process, which can be over a hundred times the amount in fresh or frozen chiles. For people on a potassium restricted diet, the opposite is true: canned chiles have one & a half the potassium content as fresh ones. Some experts blame this anomaly on the hot lye bath method of removing the tough pepper skins, a technique which provides additional sodium by absorption and reduces the potassium through leaching. It should be noted that some processors have switched to a high pressure steam treatment to remove skins; a far more healthy and tasty method.Many varieties of the Capsicum species are not hot, or pungent. Most paprikas grown in Europe and bell peppers grown in the US have little or no pungency. These varieties are used fresh, or often used to color other foods. The wilder varieties, on the other hand, range from mildly to extremely pungent. This is entirely due to the substance capsaicin, or, actually, a group of similar substances called capsaicinoids. Pure capsaicin, or 8-methyl-n-vanillyl-6-nonenamide, is a whitish powder which is soluble in alcohol but insoluble in cold water, which is why drinking water to help alleviate the burning won't work. The capsaicinoids are unique compared to other "spicy" substances such as mustard oil (zingerone and allyl isothiocyanate), black pepper (piperine) and ginger (gingerol) in that capsaicin causes a long-lasting selective desensitization to the irritant pain by repeated doses of a low concentration or a single high concentration dose. This is familiar to most 'chile-heads' as an increasing ability to eat hotter chile peppers and foods.

Capsaicin, also known as N-Vanillyl-8-methyl-6-(E)-noneamide, is the most pungent of the group of compounds called capsaicinoids isolated from peppers. It is sparingly soluble in water, but very soluble in fats, oils and alcohol. The second most common capsaicinoid is Dihydrocapsaicin:Capsaicin and Dihydrocapsaicin together make up 80-90% of the capsaicinoids found in the fruit. In C. annuum the total capsaicinoid content ranges from 0.1 to 1.0%, and the capsaicin:dihydrocapsaicin ratio is about 1:1. In C. frutescens(Tabasco peppers) the total content ranges from 0.4-1.0% with the ratio around 2:1.

Scoville Units were invented in 1912 by a pharmacist named Wilbur Scoville. These units measure the amount of capsaicin (the chemical that provides the heat) in a pepper. Measuring by Scoville Units is very subjective. To achieve a rating, it takes three out of five people to taste the heat in a diluted solution of alcohol and sugar water. The ratio of dilution is the Scoville Unit. For example, the Chiltepin is usually detected by 60 percent of the testers when diluted at a ratio of 1 part to 50,000 parts solution (1:50,000 and up to 1:100,000).

Scale adapted from Moucka, Ronald B., "Turn Up The Heat With Chilies", Zymurgy (Vol.17, No. 4).
The Jan/Feb 1995 issue of _Chile_Pepper_ magazine says: " A 1994 Red Savina Habanero from GNS Spices has tested an astonishing 577,000 Scoville Units and is believed to be the hottest pepper ever tested..." Incredible! This is about TWICE as hot as your average orange habanero!

and now even hotter than a habanero .... 9/5/00: GUWAHATI, India (Reuters) - The hottest chili on earth is Indian. Four Indian
scientists have discovered that a type of chili grown in the country's northeast has the highest Scoville units of pure capsaicin -- a measure of hotness. Called the Tezpur chili, after the area where it is grown, scientists say the pepper has beaten Mexico's Red Savina Habanero, widely acclaimed as the hottest chili in the world. Tezpur lies on the banks of the river Brahmaputra about 112 miles from Guwahati, the main city of Assam, which is better known for its flavorsome tea than its chilis. "The Tezpur chili was rated having 855,000 Scoville units... the Mexican chili contained 557,000 Scoville units of pure capsaicin," one of the scientists, who asked not to be identified, told Reuters. The scientists work in defense laboratories in Guwahati and Gwalior. The Scoville scale is named after German scientist Wilbur Scoville, the first to measure the heat component in chili. India is the world's top producer of chilis, exporting an estimated 35 tons a year.

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